No Book but the World: A Novel Read Online Free Page A

the stuffy-nosed and the lazy-eyed, our knees and elbows bumping and overlapping (he did not mind being touched so much when he was very little) as we nested among the cool, gray, disintegrating flowers.
    While I read, Freddy sucked his thumb hard and ran the fingers of his other hand over the illustrations, always tracing the pictures with gentleness at first, but often getting overexcited and rubbing faster and harder, scratching at the pictures with his sharp little nails so that I’d have to push his hand away. “Cut it out, Freddy. No.
Stop
.” When that didn’t work I’d shut the book with a smack.
    Then he’d let out a rattling scream of protest—I could see the disgusting dangling thing at the back of his throat—and begin to plead and whine for what had been taken away.
    Primly I’d tell him: “Calm down. I can’t open the book unless you promise to be gentle.”
    But this I well knew he could not deliver. He was incapable of reeling himself in once he’d achieved such a state, and things would inevitably devolve into a kicking fight, both of us with our bare legs and heels delivering a frenzy of blows, and the book would sink between two cushions and the poor faded flowers of our battlefield would fray a little more. If our mother was in the vicinity, she’d swoop down and extract Freddy—always Freddy, not me, even as he grew to be the larger, heavier one—from the tumult, but if our father was there he would only stand by.
    “Make him cut it out!” I’d demand.
    But he’d lean, untroubled, against the door frame of his study, where he would have been working before the commotion roused him. “Better to work it out yourselves.” And he’d linger there, considering us from across the room with maddeningly genuine curiosity.
    Most of the time, though, we were amicable up there on the flowered couch. Burrowed among those sagging pillows and cushions, we’d lose ourselves for hours, willingly, willfully, not so much poring over as pouring ourselves into the words and pictures, illustrated guides of all that life had to offer: treachery, adventure, peril and bliss. Bright little maps, the books seemed to me, second or third cousins of the road maps we’d pick up at corner gas stations on our impromptu wanderings.
    That was something our parents did believe in: vagrant rambles, sprung loose from plan or aim. A few times a year we’d set off on excursions in the car—a rattling orange Dasher with a hole in the floor a little bigger than a Susan B. Anthony dollar (I knew because I’d once stuck one through, to see if it would fit)—with little more than our sleeping bags and tent and a vague itinerary. We’d head for Cape Cod and make it all the way up to Acadia National Park, or set out for Delaware and wind up visiting the wild ponies on Assateague. Wherever we went, when we stopped for gas our mother would disappear inside the shop to pay for the fuel, and she’d frequently come out bearing the same three items: a sack of sunflower seeds, a copy of the local paper, and a road map of the sort that used to be free at filling stations. Sometimes she’d emerge carrying drinks, too, but more often we’d make do with paper cups of warm water dispensed from the big red Thermos jug, with its little hinged spout, that rode on the floor between her feet. She’d pass out cups of water and handfuls of sunflower seeds, and Fred and I would make a game of trying to spit out the hulls, once we’d sucked off all the salt and cracked them open between our teeth, through the hole in the bottom of the car.
    The age difference between our parents was nineteen or twenty years, depending on what time of year you made your calculation. Our father was fifty-nine when I was born. I only ever knew him with white hair, but it was a youthful head of white, thick and curly and roughly cherubic. In public school, in tenth-grade English, when I encountered the description of Odysseus’s “hyacinthine locks,” it